A new way to reward innovation in African agriculture:

Proportional
prizes for the adoption of new technologies

This page
provides links to the research behind a novel approach to development
assistance, to help African farmers raise their incomes and reduce
malnutrition. The new approach allows donors to reward innovators whose
new technologies most successfully meet farmers’ needs.

These
proportional “prize rewards” would be cash payments, made to innovators after
their technologies are adopted, like a royalty payment for non-market
services. Prize rewards would be strictly proportional to the extent of
adoption and impact, using verifiable data from controlled experiments and
farm surveys to document which new techniques work best in what areas.

In a nutshell…

The
proposal is for a specific way to deliver cash payments to innovators, in
direct proportion to the social benefits generated by farmers’ adoption of
the techniques they helped to develop and disseminate. These prize
rewards would help innovators expand their activities, and also attract
private investors and other donor funding to help to spread the most
successful new technologies.

To
earn these proportional royalties, innovators would submit data from
controlled experiments and adoption surveys to a prize secretariat, which
would audit the data and submit certified results to donors for disbursement
against lines of credit allocated for this program. Payment rates
would depend on the available prize funds and the extent of measured gains in
each time period.